I waste time to not waste time

I’m using a web server on my local machine plus an edited /etc/hosts file to serve up a page that reminds me to get back to work when I should be getting back to work, rather than, say, reading facebook. Yes, I can get around this by clearing my hosts file, but that makes it work to get to the blocked sites, and if I’m going to be doing work, it’s not time-wasting is it?

That takes care of redirecting a lot of pages to localhost, rather than their real IP addresses. On my computer, I have a little web server, which is launched with the commandsudo webfsd -p 80 -f index.htm -u ams -r /home/ams/weblock/

Webfs, and it’s daemon part webfsd, is a static-file-only http server. In this invocation, it runs as my user after binding to port 80 as root, and serves the file index.htm out of the directory /home/ams/weblock. That file is a very simple HTML file:

It just shows the text “What should you be doing?” in the middle of the page. This is also interesting because it shows how to center HTML content in the middle of the page, at least for small content. I’m not sure how well this works with larger or more complex content.